Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public

By Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe

Congress is crippled by ideological conflict. The political parties are more polarized today than at any time since the Civil War. Americans disagree, fiercely, about just about everything, from terrorism and national security, to taxes and government spending, to immigration and gay marriage.
Well, American elites disagree fiercely. But average Americans do not. This, at least, was the position staked out by Philip Converse in his famous essay on belief systems, which drew on surveys carried out during the Eisenhower Era to conclude that most Americans were innocent of ideology. In Neither Liberal nor Conservative, Donald Kinder and

Nathan Kalmoe argue that ideological innocence applies nearly as well to the current state of American public opinion. Real liberals and real conservatives are found in impressive numbers only among those who are deeply engaged in political life. The ideological battles between American political elites show up as scattered skirmishes in the general public, if they show up at all.

If ideology is out of reach for all but a few who are deeply and seriously engaged in political life, how do Americans decide whom to elect president; whether affirmative action is good or bad? Kinder and Kalmoe offer a persuasive group-centered answer. Political preferences arise less from ideological differences than from the attachments and antagonisms of group life. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226452593

Book preview

Neither Liberal nor Conservative

CHICAGO STUDIES IN AMERICAN POLITICS

A series edited by

Benjamin I. Page, Susan Herbst, Lawrence R. Jacobs, and Adam J. Berinsky

Also in the series:

Strategic Party Government: Why Winning Trumps Ideology by Gregory Koger and Matthew J. Lebo

The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker by Katherine J. Cramer

POST-RACIAL or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era by Michael Tesler

Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives by James M. Curry

Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis by Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph

Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion and Manipulation by James N. Druckman and Lawrence R. Jacobs

Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle by Andrea Louise Campbell

Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control by Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver

How the States Shaped the Nation: American Electoral Institutions and Voter Turnout, 1920–2000 by Melanie Jean Springer

The American Warfare State: The Domestic Politics of Military Spending by Rebecca U. Thorpe

Changing Minds or Changing Channels? Partisan News in an Age of Choice by Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson

Trading Democracy for Justice: Criminal Convictions and the Decline of Neighborhood Political Participation by Traci Burch

White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making by Nicholas Carnes

How Partisan Media Polarize America by Matthew Levendusky

The Politics of Belonging: Race, Public Opinion, and Immigration by Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn

Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why by Roderick P. Hart, Jay P. Childers, and Colene J. Lind

The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter by Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien

Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch by Sean Gailmard and John W. Patty

Electing Judges: The Surprising Effects of Campaigning on Judicial Legitimacy by James L. Gibson

Follow the Leader? How Voters Respond to Politicians’ Policies and Performance by Gabriel S. Lenz

The Social Citizen: Peer Networks and Political Behavior by Betsy Sinclair

The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy by Suzanne Mettler

Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race by Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram

Why Parties? A Second Look by John H. Aldrich

News That Matters: Television and American Opinion, Updated Edition by Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder

Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion by Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, and Robert Y. Shapiro

Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America by Michael Tesler and David O. Sears

Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate by Gregory Koger

In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq by Adam J. Berinsky

Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion by Donald R. Kinder and Cindy D. Kam

The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans by Matthew Levendusky

Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public by Jennifer L. Merolla and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister

Agendas and Instability in American Politics, Second Edition by Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones

The Private Abuse of the Public Interest by Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs

The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform by Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller

Same Sex, Different Politics: Success and Failure in the Struggles over Gay Rights by Gary Mucciaroni

Neither Liberal nor Conservative

Ideological Innocence in the American Public

DONALD R. KINDER AND NATHAN P. KALMOE

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45231-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45245-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45259-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226452593.001.0001

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016046170

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Philip E. Converse

Scholar Unsurpassed

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Innocent of Ideology?

Converse and His Critics

CHAPTER 1.  Converse’s Claim

CHAPTER 2.  The Great Debate

The Nature of Ideological Identification in Mass Publics

CHAPTER 3.  Meaning and Measurement of Ideological Identification

CHAPTER 4.  Becoming Ideological

CHAPTER 5.  In the Long Run

CHAPTER 6.  Consequences?

Conclusion

CHAPTER 7.  Findings and Implications

Appendix A:  Alternative Measures of Ideological Identification

Appendix B:  Are Moderates Ideological?

Notes

References

Index

Preface

Long ago and far away, Kinder had the good fortune to find himself in a seminar taught by David Sears. Sears assigned The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics by Philip Converse. Kinder read it, and has never been quite the same since.

Kinder decided to write his seminar paper on critical reaction to Converse’s essay. Turns out, there was quite a bit of it. There was so much, in fact, that Kinder had no chance to complete his paper by the end of the term (an arbitrary deadline, in any case).

Years passed. Kinder and family—Janet, Benjamin, Samuel, and Jacob—embarked on a road trip. They headed out from Ann Arbor. Their destination was Stanford, where they were to spend the academic year in blissful sabbatical. They meandered, stopping often to take in the natural wonders of the American West. Nearing the end of their journey, late on a hot summer day, they pulled in to the parking lot of a dusty diner, in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. In fact, the diner was exactly somewhere. It was in Nevada and in Utah, perfectly bisected by the state line. This meant that their table was on Mountain Time; the men’s bathroom, on Pacific. The children, having been cooped up in the family station wagon for most of the day, found it fantastic, great fun, to move rapidly back and forth between the two, somehow magically gaining and losing an hour.

Kinder and Janet sat there, barely conscious, having been cooped up in the family station wagon for most of the day, and pretended the children belonged to someone else. The door of the diner swung open, and in walked Philip Converse. He was heading east to Ann Arbor, having just finished his stint as director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Kinder and Janet were delighted to see him, he was happy to see them, and he pretended not to mind their raucous children.

Years passed. Kinder decided it was time to complete his essay, to finish what he had started in the spring of 1970. He enlisted Kalmoe, then a young, splendid student, and possessed of epic patience. It took a while, but together, Kinder and Kalmoe prevailed.

* * *

We are delighted that our book is being published by the University of Chicago Press, and delighted as well that the publishing has been overseen by John Tryneski. John persuaded two reviewers to dig deep into our manuscript, which we had prematurely concluded was a book. The reviewers made a lot of trouble for us, but of the very best kind. We are most grateful for the time and thought they put into our work. If it is still not the book they wished we had written, it is at least much improved over what they first saw.

We thank David Sears, who started us on this journey, for that and many other things, and the University of Michigan, an extraordinary place, for stimulating colleagues and the opportunity to follow our interests wherever they might lead. Molly Reynolds deserves special thanks for helping us get to the finish line in the last year as our professional obligations multiplied and our time was divided. Leslie Keros provided superb and meticulous editing. And we thank discussants and participants at Midwest Political Science Association and American Political Science Association conferences for their helpful feedback on early versions of this work.

Philip Converse died on December 30, 2014. We had hoped to finish in time to present a copy of our book to him. Converse is gone but his work endures, and that provides some consolation. However, for those of us fortunate enough to call him friend and colleague, and who knew him not only as an extraordinary scholar but also as a humane and generous spirit, he will be sorely missed. We dedicate our book to his memory.

Introduction

Innocent of Ideology?

For those who seek to understand the structures and dynamics of political life, the concept of ideology has proven very nearly irresistible. Electoral competition, executive influence, the legislative enterprise, bureaucratic politics, judicial decisions: in all these cases and more, political actors are assumed to be motivated, at least in part, by ideological conviction. According to Marcel Gauchet, the prominent French historian and philosopher, ideology has conquered the planet. Liberal and conservative, left and right, have become universal political categories. They are part of the basic notions which generally inform the way contemporary societies work (Gauchet 1992, 84, quoted in Bobbio 1996, 92).

The American political system would seem to offer up a superb case in point. Congress is crippled by ideological differences. The political parties are more polarized today than at any time since the Civil War. The courts decide First Amendment cases depending on whether it is liberal or conservative speech that is being suppressed. News organizations abandon objectivity for ideological purity. Pundits behave badly, hurling insults at one another. As Ronald Dworkin summarizes our situation, We disagree, fiercely, about almost everything. We disagree about terror and security, social justice, religion in politics, who is fit to be a judge, and what democracy is (2006, 1).¹

When Dworkin says we he has (or should have) in mind political elites—those whose lives are immersed in politics and who exert disproportionate influence over policy and discourse. It is a relatively small group: the president; congressional leaders; the Supreme Court; presidential candidates; prominent journalists and editorial writers; publicists for interest groups, corporations, and political movements; and a handful of public intellectuals. These people differ from one another in many ways, but they have one thing in common. On the subject of politics, all are experts.²

The average citizen is not. To the ongoing and perhaps increasingly bitter ideological arguments dividing elites, most Americans are little more than casual spectators. Parochial in interest, modest in intellect, and burdened by the demands and obligations of everyday life, most citizens lack the wherewithal and motivation to grasp political matters in a deep way. People are busy with more pressing things; politics is complicated and far away. Ideology is not for them.

That, at least, was the position staked out by Walter Lippmann. In a series of influential essays written in the aftermath of World War I, Lippmann argued that the democratic ideal of the fully informed citizen was unattainable and should be abandoned. It was unrealistic in the same way that it was unrealistic for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer (Lippmann 1925, 39). According to Lippmann,

The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually, and wars occasionally remind him he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance.

Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. As a private person he does not know for certain what is going on, or who is doing it, or where he is being carried (13).

In a similar vein, Joseph Schumpeter (1942) argued against strong forms of democracy on the grounds that the people were not up to the task. When asked to consider matters of political importance, the average person, according to Schumpeter, is impatient of long or complicated argument, is in possession of weak rational processes, is not ‘all there.’ In Schumpeter’s judgment, the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again (257, 262).

Neither Lippmann nor Schumpeter held out hope that ordinary people would be interested in big ideas. Both wrote authoritatively, but neither presented empirical proof. Schumpeter was right to say that deciding whether ordinary people possessed the means to participate fully and thoughtfully in discussions over their country’s future required not reckless assertion but rather laborious appraisal of a maze of conflicting evidence (1942, 254)—but he did not undertake such an analysis himself. To be fair, in Schumpeter’s time, there was hardly any evidence worth analyzing.

Which brings us, some twenty years later, to Philip Converse and his celebrated, or notorious but certainly powerful, essay on the nature of belief systems in mass publics, published in 1964. Like Lippmann and Schumpeter, Converse was motivated by an interest in how (and how well) ordinary people in democratic societies reasoned about politics. Converse enjoyed some crucial technical advantages over his predecessors, however. Most notable was the invention of the probability sample. Properly executed, probability sampling ensures that all citizens—rich and poor, young and old, men and women, of all races and faiths—are presented for study in numbers proportionate to their presence in the electorate. Probability sampling, along with advances in attitude measurement and statistical methods, meant that Converse could do what Lippmann and Schumpeter could not. Commencing with Converse, ideology became an object of scientific inquiry.

After a careful and probing analysis of a series of national election surveys carried out during the Eisenhower years, Converse concluded that the American mass public—any mass public, really—was incapable of following, much less actively participating in, ideological discussion. Converse found that most Americans were indifferent to or mystified by liberalism and conservatism as political ideas; that their opinions on government policy displayed little evidence of coherent organization along ideological lines; and that relatively modest proportions of the electorate were in possession of real opinions, even on matters of obvious national importance. In Converse’s judgment, most Americans were innocent of ideology.³

Publication of Converse’s essay set off a huge commotion. The blowback was fierce. Critics poked holes in Converse’s argument, took exception to his methods, claimed he generalized his results recklessly, and pointed to transformations in American society that rendered his claim obsolete. But when all the evidence is considered and all the counterarguments assessed, Converse’s claim of ideological innocence, taken on its own terms, stands up. So, at least, we will argue here.

Coming to grips with Converse and his critics is serious business—we spend the first part of the book on just this enterprise—but (switching metaphors) we have bigger fish to fry. Getting the Converse literature straight is important in itself, but doing that alone would be insufficient to reach a rounded assessment of the public’s ideological capacity and appetite. If we were to take up Converse’s claim strictly on its own terms and then declare our business complete, we would overlook a thriving and largely independent line of research that seems, on the surface at least, to suggest very nearly the opposite of what Converse was urging.

At about the time the first and most contentious round of debate over the ideological performance of the American public was beginning to subside, a new question was making its way onto the American National Election Study (ANES), the leading and longest-running study of voters and elections in the United States (and indeed the world). Beginning in 1972, and in every election study since, citizens surveyed by ANES interviewers have been asked whether they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives, and if so, to locate themselves on a seven-point scale, stretching from liberal on the left to conservative on the right.

It turns out that when asked directly in this way, many Americans describe themselves in ideological terms. Or as we will say, when asked, many Americans identify with an ideological point of view. That’s surprising, if Converse is right. More surprising still, ideological identification appears to be meaningful: those who identify as liberal tend to favor redistributive policies and vote for Democratic candidates; those who identify as conservative tend to favor reductions in government spending and vote Republican.⁴

These empirical relationships are unpretentious—they are statistical tendencies, not logical imperatives—but they show up with impressive regularity. Analysis of ideological identification has become standard practice, and ideological identification itself has become part of the new conventional wisdom (see figure I.1).⁵ Christopher Ellis and James Stimson go so far as to say that ideological identification is nearly indispensable to the beliefs and choices of American citizens (2009, 388). Ordinary people, it seems, can hardly do without it.

Figure I.1 Research on ideological identification, 1960–2015 (count of number of articles per year in top four journals)

Note: Journals are American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Public Opinion Quarterly.

What does all this research activity have to say to the general claim of ideological innocence? Oddly enough, not much. With a few notable exceptions, ideological identification researchers have gone about their business without pausing to consider the larger debate on ideology. Moreover, they have gone about their business (again with important exceptions) without scrutinizing what Americans are saying—what they are really saying—when they describe themselves in ostensibly ideological terms.⁶

We speak to both problems here. The heart of our book reports a thorough investigation, long overdue, into the nature of ideological identification: its meaning, measurement, origins, tenacity, persistence, and consequences. That completed, we will be in a position to reconcile the evidence on ideological identification with the general claim of ideological innocence. To what extent must we reassess the ideological capacity of the American electorate, given what we know—what we are about to find out—regarding Americans’ propensity to describe themselves in ideological terms?

Looking Ahead

We begin, in chapter 1, by recapitulating Converse’s original argument. The need to do so may seem surprising. After all, in election and public opinion circles, Converse’s essay is as famous as famous gets. Famous? Yes. Carefully read? No, not always. To make sure we start off in the right direction, we must begin with a clear account of what Converse was claiming more than fifty years ago.

Chapter 2 then takes up the scholarly storm set off by the publication of Converse’s essay. Sifting through the evidence, weighing the claims pro and con, occasionally adding new findings of our own, we conclude that well into the twenty-first century, the American electorate is, by and large, still innocent of ideology.

This conclusion is provisional, of course, for it leaves aside the well-established finding that Americans in large numbers seem quite willing to identify as liberals or as conservatives, to describe themselves in ideological terms. To assess the challenge that this finding poses to the general conclusion of ideological innocence requires extensive and careful treatment.

We initiate this treatment in chapter 3 by stipulating what we mean by ideological identification and showing that the standard measure of ideological identification is serviceable. These matters accomplished, we then begin to explore the nature of ideological identification in the American mass public. A